“Here,” Seb says, throwing a bag of ice and a tea towel at me the second I emerge from the safety of my bedroom. “I know how brutal her punches can be.”
“Thanks,” I mutter, pressing it to my swollen eye.
“I guess you’re going to need this too.” He walks out of the kitchen with two bottles of vodka in his hand, two glasses in the other. He gives me one of the bottles before lowering the glasses to my coffee table and pouring generous measures for him and Stella.
“What, no glass?”
“From what I’ve witnessed so far, I’m assuming you’re going to need the bottle,” he quips. And to be fair, I can’t exactly argue.
Falling down on the opposite sofa from the two of them, I twist the cap off the bottle and bring it to my lips, chugging down way more than I usually would.
Once my throat can’t take any more and my belly is beginning to warm, I slam it down on the coffee table and stare my sister dead in the eyes.
“How’d you find out?” I ask simply, needing to know what she already knows before I figure out a way around this minefield.
“So… funny story…” she starts, making my fists curl with impatience. “I came back from a workout with Emmie and ran straight into this broken mess of a girl fleeing the building.”
“Fuck,” I hiss under my breath. But of course, she doesn’t miss it.
“I assumed Alex had pumped her and dumped her until she revealed that she had no fucking clue who Alex was. So that meant she could only have been running from one other person.”
I fucking knew bringing her back here was a risk, but it was the only place I could successfully set up all the cameras without it looking like a totally kinky setup. Not that I really think she would have minded all that much.
“I took her home,” Stella states. And although her voice is bitter and full of venom, something inside me breathes a massive sigh of relief that she looked after Jodie for me. That someone was there to help hold her together and deliver her back safely. “And this is where shit gets really fucked up,” she says, making Seb pay even closer attention.
“Her mom invited me in. I followed them into the living room, and you’ll never fucking guess whose photos damn near cover every surface of that room.”
Seb’s brows pull together in confusion as he looks between the two of us as if the answer is going to be written all over our faces.
“Go on,” he prompts, desperately needing the answer.
“Jonas.”
“What?” he asks, half shocked, half amused. “Why would they have photos of that cunt in their…”
“Yeah, Toby. Why exactly would that be?” Stella asks, her eyes narrowing on me.
Lifting my hand, I push my hair back from my brow, slumping lower on the sofa.
“She’s Joker’s sister. Jonas’s daughter.”
Silence rings out around the flat as they both absorb that information.
“Wait…” Seb says, sitting forward and holding his hand up to stop fuck knows who from talking. “You’ve been fucking Jonas’s daughter?”
“Oh,” Stella pipes up before I even get a chance to say anything. “It’s so much worse than that. Isn’t it, Toby?”
Dropping my head back on the sofa, I squeeze my eyes closed as an unbearable silence falls between us.
“Go on, put my imagination to rest. Because I’ve got to tell you, it’s working on overdrive right now,” she continues after a few agonising minutes where all I do is pray that they’ll leave me to suffer in peace.
“I used her to hurt him, okay?”
“No, not really,” Stella scoffs. “Did you see the state of her, Toby? It was like you’d literally shoved your hand inside her chest and ripped her heart out.”
Her words cut me right down to the core, the pain in my chest only increasing as I think about Jodie curled around the toilet in my bathroom once more.
“What did you do, Tobes?” Seb growls, clearly about as impressed by all of this as his missus.